'Restrepo' gives Vermont family 'keyhole' into Afghan war

Sep. 16, 2010

Vermont soldier Misha Pemble-Belkin (left) appears onscreen in “Restrepo,” a feature-length documentary that won a top award at January’s Sundance Film Festival and opens Friday, Sept. 17 at the Roxy in Burlington. / Courtesy photo

Written by

Susan Green, Free Press Correspondent

When Misha Pemble-Belkin was visiting his North Ferrisburgh in-laws last month, he told them that Vermont might be a nice place for him to settle down someday. First, the 24-year-old U.S. Army sergeant will head back to Afghanistan for a second deployment, likely in the spring.

Meanwhile, Pemble-Belkin appears onscreen in “Restrepo,” a feature-length documentary that won a top award at January’s Sundance Film Festival and opens Friday, Sept. 17 at the Roxy in Burlington.

The filmmakers follow the platoon to the remote Korengal Valley, acknowledged as one of the most treacherous parts of the country, where they encounter relentless attacks by the Taliban. Not every member of the 20-man platoon survives.

“The film is wrenching,” said North Ferrisburgh resident Sue De Vos, whose granddaughter Amanda married Pemble-Belkin in August 2009. “I’ve seen it four times and it aways rips me apart.”

Hetherington, an acclaimed British photographer who lives in New York, suggests the young soldiers “are good at fighting but not at communicating. The documentary provides a little keyhole for families to understand what they have gone through.”

Junger, perhaps best known for writing 1997’s “The Perfect Storm,” and Hetherington made 10 trips to Afghanistan between June 2007 and August 2008. As reporters for Vanity Fair magazine and filmmakers, they were embedded with Pemble-Belkin’s group, which was asked to secure an area in the Korengal so other troops could later build a paved road.

“We’re going to try to bring progress here,” the commander tells bearded, impassive elders in a village that looks as if it hasn’t changed in a millennium. They fear cooperation with the Americans will bring Taliban retaliation.

Pfc. Juan “Doc” Restrepo, a medic, numbers among the platoon’s losses. The bereaved warriors dig a rudimentary fortification in the rocky soil of a barren ridge and name it Outpost Restrepo in his honor. Howling monkeys provide an eerie soundtrack. Nearby hills harbor the enemy.

The camera captures harrowing battles and barracks hijinks with a cinema-verite approach, periodically punctuated by individual narratives from soldiers after they return to their European base in Italy. Some are plagued by what Hetherington calls a “kind of a post-traumatic stress disorder.”

In the film Pemble-Belkin recalls growing up in Oregon, where his hippie pacifist parents would not allow him to play with toy guns. His motivation for enlisting: Sept. 11, 2001. Seven years later, the desire for revenge makes it personal. “By the end,” he says of his Taliban targets, “I was wishing they were closer so I could see them when I killed them.”

Pemble-Belkin, who declined a request for an interview, and his wife are in the midst of leaving Louisiana’s Fort Polk for a new base in Hawaii. He recently signed up for a five-year tour of duty.

Burlington-born Amanda De Vos was his high school sweetheart in the Pacific Northwest, where she moved in 1993. At 17, Pemble-Belkin tagged along one summer when she returned to Vermont to see her father and other relatives. The extended family operates a North Ferrisburgh organic dairy farm and trucking business.

“Misha still has a little trouble with the whole Afghanistan experience,” Christopher De Vos said. “He can’t sit through the entire film, which is so intense.”

If hostility about the American presence is the prevailing mood now, attitudes may have been quite different in the early days of the war. “Sebastian was there in 2001 and people hugged him because they were so happy to be rid of the oppressive Taliban regime,” Hetherington said. “What alienated Afghans is that we turned our attention to the invasion of Iraq. The film is a testimony to that blunder. This is what a bad counterinsurgency looks like. We need to create a paradigm shift in the conversation about this war.”

The focus must turn from nation-building to “giving the people a reasonable opportunity to be secure,” contends Hetherington, who will return to Afghanistan in October with Junger for another Vanity Fair assignment.

One year after the end of Pemble-Belkin’s deployment, the Army decided to abandon Outpost Restrepo, the valley itself and the proposed road to nowhere.

And the platoon’s reaction to the futility of their Korengal mission? Hetherington suspects these soldiers would hesitate to challenge the logic of military strategy. “Our troops don’t have the big picture,” he says. “These are the guys on the sharp end of American foreign policy.”